‘I won’t stop to inquire--’ said Charley, plunging at once into argument--‘what influence for good it might or might not have to love a non-existence: I will only ask--Is it a good God he loves or a bad one? If the latter, he can hardly be called good for loving him.’ ‘But if there be a God at all, he must be a good God.’ ‘Suppose the true God to be the good God, it does not follow that my father worships _him_. There is such a thing as worshipping a false God. At least the Bible recognizes it. For my part, I find myself compelled to say--either that the true God is not a good God, or that my father does not worship the true God. If you say he worships the God of the Bible, I either admit or dispute the assertion, but set it aside as altering nothing; for if I admit it, the argument lies thus: my father worships a bad God; my father worships the God of the Bible: therefore the God of the Bible is a bad God; and if I admit the authority of the Bible, then the true God is a bad God. If, however, I dispute the assertion that he worships the God of the Bible, I am left to show, if I can, that the God of the Bible is a good God, and, if I admit the authority of the Bible, to worship another than my father’s God. If I do not admit the authority of the Bible, there may, for all that, be a good God, or, which is next best to a perfectly good God, there may be no God at all.’ ‘Put like a lawyer, Charley: and yet I would venture to join issue with your first assertion--on which the whole argument is founded--that your father worships a bad God.’ ‘Assuredly what he asserts concerning his God is bad.’ ‘Admitted; but does he assert _only_ bad things of his God?’ ‘I daren’t say that. But God is one. You will hardly dare the proposition that an infinite being may be partly good and partly bad.’ ‘No. I heartily hold that God must be _one_--a proposition far more essential than that there is one God--so far, at least, as my understanding can judge. It is only in the limited human nature that good and evil can co-exist. But there is just the point: we are not speaking of the absolute God, but of the idea of a man concerning that God. You could suppose yourself utterly convinced of a good God long before your ideas of goodness were so correct as to render you incapable of attributing anything wrong to that God. Supposing such to be the case, and that you came afterwards to find that you had been thinking something wrong about him, do you think you would therefore grant that you had been believing either in a wicked or in a false God?’ ‘Certainly not.’ ‘Then you must give your father the same scope. He attributes what we are absolutely certain are bad things to his God--and yet he may believe in a good God, for the good in his idea of God is that alone in virtue of which he is able to believe in him. No mortal can believe in the bad.’ ‘He puts the evil foremost in his creed and exhortations.’